I've been really pleased with my progress as a newbie, especially with incorporating my database into displayed tables using the extensions that this group told me about.
Here are some additional needs/questions that I would appreciate pointers to from those who've gone before...
1) I'll want to merge the registration for the wiki portion with the non-wiki existing site. I'm thinking that I need to have all users go through the wiki registration and then ask them if they want to record the additional info required for the non-wiki portions. So I'll need to modify the non-wiki to recognize users that have logged in to the wiki.
2) What is the best way to modify the pages templates? For example, if I wanted to add a "Donations" link likes WikiPedia's? Or links to the non-wiki sections? Or display the time in Timbuctoo in the bottom left corner? Or have a second image randomly selected that morphs out of the main logo image? Obviously I'm looking for general pointers, not specific solutions here. (That may come later :] )
3) I've been transferring articles by hand from WikiPedia to my GenWiki, but am wondering if there's a better way. I've looked at the WikiPedia's data dump downloads instruction pages, but frankly they don't make it seem too easy, especially if I'm using a remote web server that I don't admin. Is this the case? Besides, even if I could magically transfer the data, I'd need to weed out most of it. Also, the storage space would be a problem until I weeded. I doubt that it exists, but what would best serve my needs would be some spider that given a start page, crawls my GenWiki looking for empty articles and then goes to WikiPedia (using approved behavior of one page per second, etc) and copies the edit box material and pastes it back into my GenWiki. It should be configurable to limit the levels of linkage so that it only drills down to that many links. Given enough time, I can create such a spider in Perl (but I'm not set up right now, nor am I proficient in Perl. I played with a couple of years ago.), but wonder if someone has a better, more immediate solution to point me to.
TIA,
James Birkholz admin, Posen-L mailing list and website http://www.Posen-L.com